Shoreline Tracer

Known problems

The program opens the Windows File Explorer and the Windows NotePad editor and as such might not run on Window 10S devices.

Training: Cannot find the TensorFlow.dll

The application will crash with no error message

The program uses the Microsoft Edge WebView2 to download GoogleMaps satellite image tiles for shoreline tracing. If the downloads are of too many tiles, too fast, or are of too many tile location where tiles do not exists, the "EmbeddedBrowserWebView.dll" will abort and will cause the Shoreline Tracer to crash. When the program crashes the Windows OS will record the error in the Windows event log. To review the log, open the Windows "Event Viewer". Select the "Windows Logs" folder. Select the "Application" folder. In the right side "Action" panel, click the "Find" icon, In the "Find" dialog's "Find what" box, enter "EmbeddedBrowserWebView.dll" and click "Find Next". Basically, GoogleMaps allows 25000 requests for tiles per day. If the limit is exceeded, the program might experience a 'Denial of service' for about 24-hours.

The session already exists

If you have closed all Shoreline Tracer sessions and the Shoreline Tracer windows are not visible; you then start a new session and the program reports the session already exists, then when you closed the prior sessions, the Windows OS did not delete the lock file or did not remove the one or more sessions from the Task Manager.

To unlock closed sessions, make certain all Shoreline Tracer sessions are closed and then manually delete the lock-file. The "*.lock" files are located in the "Sessions" folder. The name of the lock-file is the name of the session. If you cannot delete the lock-file, then it is probably still active in the Windows Task Manager.

To remove the Shoreline Tracer from the Task Manager, Open the Task Manager window.

To open the Task Manager, move the mouse cursor to the the lower left corner of the Windows Desktop and with the mouse right-button, click the Windows "Start" button then, in the popup menu, select the "Task Manage" command. Window will open the Task Manage window.

In the Task Manager window, click the "Processes" tab and scroll the list of processes until you find one or more "Shoreline Tracer" entries. Click and kill each "Shoreline Tracer" entry. To kill a selected Shoreline Tracer process, click the "End task" button in the lower right corner of the Task Manager.

Restart the Shoreline Tracer App and reselect the desired session. The session should start.

If the program hangs, do not restart Windows

If the Shoreline Tracer will not respond to your input and you cannot close the program, you can kill the Shoreline Tracer process using the Task Manager as described above.

Documentation

During development, the program underwent numerous organizational changes. The documentation might not accurately reflect those changes.

Please report the documentation errors or omissions: Contact

Fudge factors

The program uses four fudge factors that might not be correct for your computer. If you cannot get the program to trace the shoreline, then review the Calibration help topic on changing the fudge factor values.

Multiple Shoreline Tracer Instances

The program is designed to trace more than one shoreline at a time. This feature requires that you start a separate session of the Shoreline Tracer for each shoreline. Unless each shoreline is a uniquely named session, the program cannot trace the same shoreline from two or more start locations.

Your computer might not be able to process more than one shoreline at a time.

The Trainer

Training and retraining can require minutes or hours. You should start training with a relatively small number of samples (20-to-30.) Add additional samples only as needed when shoreline tracing fails, retrain the image classifier, and resume tracing.

Image Classification Failures

A "Remote Desktop connect or disconnect will cause the running remote shoreline tracing to wander off and generate a continuous series of small loops.

The image classifier has trouble identifying the shoreline for the following cases.

  1. Shallow rocky shorelines. You will likely have to manually trace around the rocky area to a point where you can resume the automated tracing.

  2. Sharp protruding shorelines. You can usually resume tracing by trying to resume with a new direction rounding the projection.

  3. Isolated rocks near the shoreline. This case is similar to the prior two cases. The program will trace out toward the rock detected as a shoreline but cannot navigate around the rock.

  4. Broad flat beaches with a blurred shoreline. This case might require additional training images and retraining. Alternatively, delete all training images and train for this special case.

  5. Shorelines hidden with a shadow. You will have to manually trace the shoreline hidden in the shadows.

  6. If the scan size is large, the step size is large, and the plot window size is small, the program might not be able to scan the shoreline because the program cannot scan outside the displayed image and the program cannot shift the image into view without shifting another scanned part out of view.

  7. Occassionally, when tracing the shoreline, the program will wander off-course, loop back, and resume tracing the shoreline. When you close the shoreline path, the loop will form an undesirable negative area. You should edit the shoreline and remove the loops.

Some of these problems can be resolved by temporarily changing a shoreline tracing parameter such as the step size, range, etc. Experiment to determine the settings to use for various Model-Classes.

If you create an image classifier model that works well for a specific Model-Class, then you should save the model with a suitable name so you can use it when needed.

In order for a future automatic model selector to work, each 'Model-Class' and its related model should contain one and only one class of shoreline.

Windows 10S

The Shoreline Tracer might not run on Windows 10S systems because it starts external processes to open the Windows NotePad text editor and the Windows File Explorer.

Reference: Validation Result











End